Technology: How to serve up 20 channels in one dish

The mushrooming of satellite receiver dishes could be slowed by an Australian dish that can pick up signals from up to 20 satellites at the same time. The dish can also track a satellite moving across the sky without moving itself.

'It's a bit like having one television set to receive several channels, instead of having to buy a different set for each channel,' says Trevor Bird, an electrical engineer with the Australian government's CSIRO research organisation in Sydney. The developers of the dish, led by Bird, believe it has applications ranging from satellite TV and telecommunications to radioastronomy and defence.

Existing dishes can communicate with only one satellite at a time because they direct the incoming signal to a single focal point. There, the signal is channelled by a cone-shaped 'feed horn' onto a detector which transmits it onwards to an electronic receiver.

The Australian team has reshaped the ...

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